Keyword searches are mostly known to get your website noticed by search engines through a practice commonly referred to as search engine optimization or SEO. This blog isn’t about how SEO can help your website get the most “hits.” This blog is about how we at gap intelligence created our own internal reverse SEO process that has helped fuel the growth of our Europe MFP-Copier contract database.

gap intelligence tracks MFPs in 14 countries in Europe with a host of different languages and currencies. This could be seen as a challenge for a small San Diego-based research firm given the private nature of copier contracts. However, this is one hurdle we have been able to overcome, in part thanks to gap SEO.

So, how exactly did we set out to accomplish the goal of creating our own SEO process? As you could guess, it started with a bit of research.

Our first step to tackling the World Wide Web was to create a list of the most commonly used keywords in contracts related to copiers. We translated each word for each EU language and from there our internal keyword list was born. With the help of Google Translator and our own internal language library, the copier team was set to scrape the web.

Over time, our team came up with creative ways to search for Europe contracts. We tried everything from combining an MFP brand and a model name with a specific keyword, to searching in a specific country using the advanced search features in Google Chrome, and searching based on a specific file type.

Here is an example of a set of search criteria that have led us to useful contract sources:

  • brand + model type + French keyword + file type = contracts!

    • Search phrase: konica bizhub proces-verbal file type:pdf

  • Advanced search settings set to:
      Region: France

  • File type: pdf

Click the image to see the results:

Rome wasn’t built in a day nor was our own reverse SEO process. As with most processes, steps had to be refined over time until we found a technique that worked for us and reflected all that we’ve learned about the European copier market. gap intelligence will continue to build out our contract database through our reverse SEO process and our European dealer program. Today we still refine our processes to help yield the best results, but we’re on the right track and have over 3,000 EU contracts to prove it.